Guide To Affiliate Marketing

Most everyone agrees that one of the quickest and easiest ways to create an income from you online business is through Affiliate Marketing.

All of the research and development has already happened when you come on the scene as an Affiliate Marketer. This saves you not only time, but lots of money. Your product has already been developed. And now, more affiliate programs give you the sales materials you need to promote their products.

This works really well for quick profits, but what about long term, residual income?

Lets look at the process a little more closely. As the Affiliate, you will do all the work of getting prospects to the product sales page through your affiliate link. The goal is to have the prospect buy the product and then as the Affiliate, you will earn a commission.

Thats great, but then you must repeat and repeat the process to keep bringing more prospects into the sale pipeline. All of this work is for a sometimes small sales commission. And after a while you will probably need to change the product and start all over.

Depending on how much you are paying to get your leads to the sales page, this can become costly. Also, you must take into consideration the conversion ratio of the sales page. If you have 100 lookers and no buyers, you may want to change a few things!

So how can an Affiliate Marketer increase the return on leads and qualified prospects?

The first thing you should do is set up your own lead capture page. Put an opt-in box here and as people sign up you will begin to create a list. Set up an auto-responder that captures the name and e-mail address of every prospect. Then fill your auto-responder with eight to ten messages describing the benefits of the product. Have these sent out at a nice interval of once a week or maybe every 4-5 days.

It is always a good idea to give something free to your prospect. This can be a free report or a review of the product. This serves as an enticement for the prospect to leave their information.

With their name and e-mail information, you can send information about other related products. If they weren’t interested in your first product, but are interested in your niche, they may buy the second or third or fourth product offered.

The second thing to do is promote your niche on other membership or services site. This maximizes your advertising. And instead of just a one-time sale, you will start a residual income. Better than that is to create your own membership site.

The cell phone companies really know how to do this residual income thing. In exchange for some freebies and goodies (free phone, phone upgrade, etc.) they require you to sign a contract for two years of service. Pretty smart, huh?

For two full years, the phone company can count on income from you. Add the thousands of others who signed a contract and their residual income is pretty good. You can do the same thing with a membership site.

So begin with the product, set up your sales page with content (articles and/or reviews), capture your leads, and then build a relationship with them. They will come to depend on you for quality information and products and will gladly sign up for a monthly membership. They will have grown to know and trust you.

And with that, you have used Affiliate Marketing programs to create a residual income.